1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a metadata processing method, a metadata storing method, a metadata adding apparatus, a control program and a recording medium, and a contents displaying apparatus and a contents imaging apparatus. The present invention relates particularly to an apparatus for adding metadata and a method therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (JP-A) No. 11-242255 describes an information inputting apparatus of a camera which is capable of set exposure conditions of given snapshots desired by a photographer (user) and the shooting order thereof by simple operation.
In addition, image data electronically shot by a digital camera is recorded in recording media such as a memory card electronically as an image file. Then, an image file to be recorded includes additional information regarding shooting as well as the image data.
More specifically, in the image file format standards Exif2.2 (JEITA CP-3451) for a digital camera established by Japan Electronics and Information Technology industries Association (JEITA), it is defined that information of a camera used in snap-shooting, information of recorded image data, information of shooting conditions or the like are stored as additional information of image.
Information of a camera in accordance with these standards includes a name of a maker and a model of an image inputting device (camera). Also, information of image data includes a resolution of vertical and horizontal directions and an image direction, and information of shooting conditions includes shooting date and time, an exposure time, an operating state of an electric flash, an exposure mode, a white balance and a shooting situation.
This shooting situation is information for classifying “standard”, “portrait” (vertical placement), “landscape” (horizontal placement) or “night scene”. This additional information is information which is attached independently to each piece of shot data. A part of such additional information is useful information of a shooting scene. It is extremely useful to add to shot data, information of, for example, a scene of entry of a bridal couple, a scene of greeting of a main guest or a scene of cutting into a wedding cake in an event of a bridal party in order for a user to view the shot data later.
In a situation where the number of snapshots to be recorded is increased more and more as the recording capacity of a recording medium used in a digital camera increases, in viewing or arranging shot data, information indicative of a situation of the shot data plays an important role.
However, the above-described conventional additional information included in a digital camera has problems as follows:
The conventional additional information is information to be added to each piece of shot data independently as metadata. The operation of adding appropriate one from plural pieces of metadata has to be carried out manually by a user for each piece of shot data. Therefore, addition of information to a large amount of data is extremely difficult in fact.
Specifically, a 512 MB compact flash memory card which is used as recording media of a digital camera can store 300 or more high-quality shot image files of 2024×1536 pixels (about 3,100,000 pixels).
In addition, in the case of a commonly-used middle-size image file of 1024×768 pixels (about 780,000 pixels), more than 1,600 shot image files can be stored.
In this way, as the number of image files is significantly increased with increasing capacity of a recording media, it becomes very difficult, impossible in fact, for a user to provide additional information to each piece of the image data.